Doorway to Disaster

Glen Martin

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, July 29, 2007

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After saving dozens of homes along Pyramid Cir, North Lake Tahoe firefighters Capt Rick Russ, Shawn Heywood and Julie Osborn stop to view the remains of one of the premier homes of the neighborhood that was lost Sunday. South Lake Tahoe's Angora Fire continues to burn, but at a slower pace than Sunday's inferno that consumed 220 buildings, many of which were homes along with 2,500 acres of forest. The wind-driven blaze is laying down for the moment as winds have dissipated since dust Sunday, 450 plus firefighters continue to try to put a ring around the blaze that threatens another 500 homes. (June 25) (cq) SUBJECT) Lance Iversen / The Chronicle Photo taken on 6/25/07,in SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, CA. less

After saving dozens of homes along Pyramid Cir, North Lake Tahoe firefighters Capt Rick Russ, Shawn Heywood and Julie Osborn stop to view the remains of one of the premier homes of the neighborhood that was ... more

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Streams of melted aluminum from a burned out van run down Mull Deer Cir in Meyers after yesterday firestorm. Engine South Lake Tahoe's Angora Fire continues to burn, but at a slower pace than Sunday's inferno that consumed 220 buildings, most of which are in Meyers California and where homes. An additional 2,500 acres of forest have been lost or damaged. The wind-driven blaze is laying down for the moment as winds have dissipated since dust Sunday, 450 plus firefighters continue to try to put a ring around the blaze that threatens another 500 homes. (June 25) (cq) SUBJECT) Lance Iversen / The Chronicle Photo taken on 6/25/07,in MEYERS, CA. less

Streams of melted aluminum from a burned out van run down Mull Deer Cir in Meyers after yesterday firestorm. Engine South Lake Tahoe's Angora Fire continues to burn, but at a slower pace than Sunday's inferno ... more

Photo: By Lance Iversen

Doorway to Disaster

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It is two weeks after the Angora Fire on Lake Tahoe's South Shore, and a small group of environmentalists and wildland policy analysts are touring the burn site. More than 200 homes were immolated here, and their ruins remain largely as they were since the embers cooled.

The visitors are silent as they survey the destruction. Over here, nothing is left but a foundation constructed from native stone. There, two gutted cars sit side by side on a concrete slab, surrounded by puddles of melted aluminum. An American flag is stuck defiantly on a mound of charred rubble. A refrigerator and range stand in a scorched hole that was once a gourmet kitchen. Chimneys reach from flattened piles of ash like stalagmites. And everywhere there are the hand-scrawled signs on plywood and cardboard, the signs you see in any California neighborhood ravaged by wildfire: Thank you, firefighters. God bless our firefighters. You are our heroes. You saved our home, thank you. We will rebuild.

The site is a testament to the reservoirs of courage and endurance that lie dormant in the human heart until catastrophe strikes, but the tour reveals something else. This was a neighborhood predestined to burn. Many of the homes were immured deep in groves of lodgepole pine and second-growth Jeffrey pine. What made them attractive was the fact that they were part of the forest. What made their destruction inevitable is that they were part of the wildland fuel load.

They were in an environment that had evolved to accommodate - indeed, require - wildfire. But the very presence of the homes dictated that fire had to be eliminated from the ecological equation. For decades, any blaze that ignited during the torrid summers was immediately snuffed by vigilant crews. The surrounding forests grew thick - far thicker than they would have had they not been subjected to nine decades of aggressive fire suppression. The greener it got, the more people liked it. But while they were living in paradise, they were also sitting on a powder keg. The fire was postponed, but it could not be denied indefinitely.

The Angora fire, in short, points to a region in great ecological disequilibrium. While the Sierra is celebrated as Muir's Range of Light, its history is checkered; it reflects human ignorance and cupidity at least as much as reverence for nature.

From the first penetration by European Americans, California's signature cordillera was a treasure trove to be plundered: For beaver at first, trapped by mountain men satisfying the fur market. Later, for precious metals and timber. After the Mother Lode was sacked, the West Slope rivers ran turbid for decades, the legacy of massive hydraulic mining. Strata of mercury-laden sediments remain in San Francisco Bay, the tainted residuum of ore processing: Quicksilver was used to precipitate the gold from the rock.

And by the early 20th century, most of the range had been logged. In the Tahoe Basin, the big Jeffrey pines were cut down wholesale, destroying an open-canopied woodland notable for behemoth trees and flower-spangled meadows. White fir, an intermediate species in the region's forest secession cycle, replaced the big pines. By the 1930s, aggressive wildfire suppression had become policy gospel for the U.S. Forest Service. What used to burn with metronomic frequency, maintaining the spacious, open-forest configuration, did not burn at all.

Around the lake, the stands of white fir and lodgepole pine became dense thickets growing from a forest floor knee-deep in litter. Denied the periodic, low-level fires that have weeded and fertilized California's wildlands for millennia, the stands became in a very real sense artificial forests. And when they did burn, they usually burned one way only: catastrophically, down to mineral earth.

The situation remains particularly severe in the Tahoe Cup, but it is repeated to greater or lesser degree across the Sierra, from Mount Lassen to the Kern River - dense second- and third-growth forests, ripe for immolation.

Economically out of whack

But it is not just the woodlands that are skewed. The Sierra's ecological problems are mirrored in its society and economy - they are all, in fact, component parts of a larger, dysfunctional whole.

A recent study from the Sierra Business Council and the Sierra Nevada Conservancy elucidates the problem in detail:

· In a state characterized by rapid population growth, the Sierra is leading in the rate of expansion. More than a million people are expected to live in the region by 2020, double the 1990 population.

· Housing prices are skyrocketing. The Sierra is one of the nation's most heated real-estate markets, with home prices doubling between 1997 and 2006.

· Sierra society is evolving toward a gerontocracy. From 1980 to 2000, the ratio of Sierra residents in the 45- to 54-year-old range grew from less than 11 percent to more than 17 percent of the total population. Concurrently, the number of Sierra Nevada residents aged 25 to 34 dropped from more than 18 percent of the total population to 10 percent.

· The age disparity is reflected by a disparity in wages and accumulated wealth. Statewide, wages account for 71 percent of income. In the Sierra, wages provide only half of per-capita income, the rest coming from investments and retirement funds. Young, working people are fleeing, many moving to the Central Valley, where rents and homes are cheaper. Some still work in the Sierra, in service or tourism jobs - but they commute back and forth, spending money on gas they cannot afford.

This is not a healthy dynamic, says David Mattocks, the president of the Sierra Business Council, a coalition of businesses that promotes environmentally sustainable commerce in the region.

"We need to make the Sierra more hospitable to families - the fabric of our society," said Mattocks. "These are the people who are our police, firefighters, nurses, teachers - the people who do the actual work. The Sierra is evolving into one big resort community, and there is very little elasticity in that kind of economy. We need to find ways to provide affordable housing and increase living-wage jobs up here."

Scott Robinson, a concrete finisher who lives near Murphys in Calaveras County, says the scarcity of young people can make it difficult to find crews for his business.

"Just about everybody who's working for me now is 50 or older," said Robinson, who is 51 and has spent most of his life in the Sierra. "One of my guys is 66. I send him home after we pour. I don't want him to strain himself on the finish work."

Robinson said the relatively low wages paid in the region, the commute costs involved in traveling to and from remote job sites and high housing costs are all working to drive young families elsewhere.

"Plus, there is very little for kids to do up here, nothing like teen clubs or organized youth activities," he said. "It's tough for them."

Robinson said affordable-housing projects could convince younger people to stay or migrate to the Sierra, but he doesn't see that happening. Relatively little of the land in the region is private - most is national forest. Even in the current real-estate slump, Sierra land is much in demand for either luxury retirement abodes or vacation homes. The marketplace is working against low-income housing, Robinson said.

"I've lived here a long time, and more and more I get the feeling that the people in control want everybody rich," he said. "Twenty years ago, you could've bought historic old homes in Murphys for $30,000. Now they're going for $1 million. Very few locals can afford that."

Energy solutions

The Sierra's forests need young families as much as the region's towns, says Mattocks. He observes there is common consensus among environmentalists and forestry experts that the woodlands must be thinned to both minimize fire danger to communities and accelerate the return of the region's classic wildland configuration: stately stands of big, widely-spaced pines in the upper elevations, parklands of scattered oaks and grasslands in the lower elevations.

But thinning is a labor-intensive and costly business, and it demands young men and women to do it; aging Boomers aren't up to the task. Past attempts to institute ambitious thinning programs in the region have foundered on inadequate funding and environmental litigation. But with wildfire danger at an all-time high, Mattocks said, it's time for everyone to get on the same page - or at least start talking about it.

Thinning produces vast amounts of woody material - not clear-grained valuable timber, but brush and skinny, misshapen trunks. But though such material is of low value, Mattocks, observes, it is not wholly worthless. It can be chipped, and some of the chips can be turned into useful products such as particle board and insulation. The rest, he says, can be burned for electrical power generation.

There already are a few such "biomass" power plants in the Sierra, producing almost 5 percent of the electricity supplied by the region. But the potential exists for many more. A 2006 report from the Western Governors' Association concluded the western states could supply 15,000 megawatts of energy from biomass sources by 2015 - enough power for 13 to 14 million homes.

For the Sierra, Mattocks said, power production would be an ancillary benefit: The real payoff would be reduced fire danger to Sierra communities and a more equitable society; thinning and biomass power production, Mattocks says, would bring timber back into the regional economy in a sustainable way. Young people would be going back into the woods to work - but to improve the forests, not raze them.

The Sierra's forests can also be used for another green industry, Mattocks says: carbon banks. The Kyoto Protocol established an international system for trading carbon credits to offset greenhouse gas emissions - primarily carbon dioxide. The California Climate Action Registry of 2006 also promotes the exchange of carbon credits as means of fighting global warming. Trees extract carbon dioxide from the air and store the carbon in woody tissue. Woodlands, then, are a logical place to sequester carbon.

Certainly, the carbon market is robust. The worldwide trade in carbon credits grew from $11 billion in 2005 to $21.5 billion during the first nine months 2006, and continued rapid expansion seems inevitable, given the intense international focus on global warming.

"The Sierra Nevada has some of the most carbon-dense land in the world," said Mattocks. "(Mature) conifer forests here absorb more than twice the amount of carbon as tropical or temperate rainforests. The development of carbon markets could be huge for the Sierra."

Sprawl reduction

But the exploitation of these markets demands maintaining the ecological health of the region, Mattocks says - which, in turn, means curbing sprawl and directing growth back toward the region's urban centers.

"It's being done to a certain extent in some areas, such as Murphys," he said. "But we need to do better. The other obvious downside to sprawl is that it leads to increased wildfire danger to people and property as housing developments expand into forested areas."

The Sierra Business Council's perspective occupies a middle ground between the general views of the environmental community and the timber industry. And like most compromise positions, it draws - so to speak - fire.

Timber industry advocates have used the Angora fire and other blazes now scorching the West as an opportunity to argue that thinning efforts must be ramped up dramatically, and that a certain percentage of larger, merchantable trees must be cut to pay for the projects.

David Bischel, the president of the California Forestry Association, said that California's forests already are overstocked with trees and that problem is worsening each year. Exacerbating the situation, said Bischel, is a drying trend in the Sierra, probably caused by global warming.

"Climate change is going to compound the threat," he said. "We're now in a situation of ever-increasing fuel loading and longer, hotter summers. We can use proscription fire (controlled burning) to a certain extent, but we run into major problems with any ambitious controlled-burn program - most of the basins in California already can't meet state air-particulate standards. You have very few days you can burn."

The solution, said Bischel, is a program that aggressively removes excess trees on a pay-as-you-go basis, using bigger trees as an incentive to attract thinning project contractors.

"That could generate a substantial amount of revenue, enough to pay for the projects," he said. "I don't know if large-scale biomass will work or not. But I do believe we can minimize wildfire risk if we're allowed to utilize wood that is being produced by these forests on an ongoing, sustainable basis."

The U.S. Forest Service is on the same essential wavelength as Bischel. Matt Mathes, a spokesman for the agency's California region, said allowing timber companies to take some trees up to 30 inches in diameter would provide critical revenues needed for thinning work. Mathes said the agency also rejects environmentalists' arguments that all such thinning should be concentrated around communities.

"The problem we saw at the Angora fire in Tahoe was the huge amount of energy the fire built up by the time it hit the residential areas," he said. By thinning in the strategic parts of the backcountry, Mathes said, "speedbumps" can be created - areas cleared of heavy fuels so fires will slow down.

"The whole point is to keep the flames low to the ground and out of the canopy, avoiding the huge crown fires that are unstoppable," he said.

Logging also produces products that collectively constitute a significant carbon bank, said Bischel.

"Half of every pound of wood is pure carbon," he said. "When you put in a wood floor or paneling that comes from a sustainable source, you're helping fight global warming."

Environmentalists agree that thinning of the Sierra's forests is essential, but they insist it must be concentrated around communities and housing tracts, where the wildfire danger to human life and property is greatest. Recent proposals to thin the forests wholesale, they say, are little more than stalking horses designed to reinstitute widespread logging across the region's public lands.

Barbara Boyle, a senior regional representative for the Sierra Club, said biomass power production isn't sustainable for the Sierra simply because an array of permanent plants would demand too much feedstock. With an ambitious biomass program, she said, sooner or later the Sierra will run out of thinnings.

"So," Boyle said, "what do you do then? Shut the plants down? Move them? We're concerned that a large biomass system will simply increase the pressure to cut."

Boyle also notes that most major thinning projects to date have been predicated on the timber industry model: funding projects by logging a certain percentage of larger trees, which are milled for valuable timber.

"That defeats the whole purpose of thinning in the first place," she said. "Bigger trees don't burn as easily as small trees. We need to save them, not cut them. We have to protect communities, but we don't want to destroy the forest in order to save it."

Boyle said the Forest Service and state officials must look at funding mechanisms different from the pay-as-you-log plan.

"And we also need to recognize that there isn't going to be a quick fix," she said. "It took us more than a century to get into this situation, and it will certainly take us decades to get out of it."

Further, Boyle said, a return to an economy based on natural-resource extraction wouldn't be good for the Sierra - and it would be virtually impossible to implement in any event. The region has become too populous, and the view people have of public wildlands has changed, she said. They now see the Sierra's forests as places to pursue recreational activities - or simply enjoy for their own sake. Few locals or visitors want to see a return of large-scale logging and industrial infrastructure.

"Recreation and tourism are big already, and they're going to get bigger," she said. "Small-scale, value-added agriculture (in the lower foothill regions) - providing local people with high-quality local food - is another valuable sector that can grow. And the expansion of high-speed Internet connections is allowing thousands of people to conduct work and business at home."

Boyle acknowledged that thinning should be expanded, but reiterated it must be concentrated around communities, where the danger is greatest.

And prescription fire - which generally costs less than mechanical thinning and returns nutrients to the soil as ash - should be employed wherever possible, she said.

"We might have to look at new air-quality prescriptions, perhaps allow them to be loosened in some situations," she said. "At a certain point, you're going to have a trade-off - massively compromised air quality from a huge wildfire, or a certain number of days of minimally compromised quality due to prescription burning. It's something we need to examine."

Ultimately, the Sierra must be viewed as a public trust, say some of its champions - a national legacy that warrants national support.

And that includes money. Timber resources will not be sufficient to fund regional fire safety, affordable housing and ecological stability, said Rochelle Nason, the executive director of the League to Save Lake Tahoe. But simply because the region can't fully pay its own way, she said, is no reason to abandon it to gradual decay.

Some innovative funding mechanisms have yet to be fully explored, says Nason - such as special property assessments. And, she insists, local governments and fire-fighting agencies must do more to compel Sierra residents to maintain defensible spaces around their homes.

Still, she said, there must also be recognition that the Sierra - not just Lake Tahoe and Yosemite, but also the entire Range of Light, from Mount Lassen to the headwaters of the Kern River - deserves public support and public funding.

"We need healthy, economically viable communities in the Sierra, but we also need to protect the elements that make the Sierra unique, irreplaceable," Nason said. "As the West becomes more crowded, the Sierra's scenic and recreational resources will become even more precious. We have to invest in them - for everybody."